The coalition wasted its first two years by focusing on reorganising the National Health Service rather than, in an era of fiscal constraint, making the fundamental changes needed to sustain the service, says its departing chief.
In his frankest remarks yet about why he decided to step down from the helm of NHS England by next March, Sir David Nicholson acknowledged on Thursday that he had become the story after being blamed by bereaved families for the avoidable deaths of more than 1,000 people at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust between 2005 and 2009.
Being that story makes it more difficult for me to do my job, he said, addressing the NHS Confederation annual conference in Liverpool.
But his most candid comments were reserved for the behaviour of politicians who, he suggested, had fallen victim to the tyranny of the electoral cycle and thus failed to take the difficult decisions about changing services that were needed to make the NHS sustainable in the long term.
During the 2010 general election campaign, political parties had promised no change, including imposing moratoriums on any hospital closures, he said. We said at the time it was not the right thing to do.
When the new government came in, we wasted those two years where you can really make change happen. We spent our time talking about reorganisation and changes and we didnt talk about the really important changes that are required for the NHS.
Although he had worked with some fantastically committed politicians, because of [the] electoral cycle, they have enormous difficulty being able to think beyond the relatively short term, he said. Politicians would never run around saying close hospitals, he said. It is our job, as leaders of the NHS, to make the arguments with our patients.
The health department said: For too long the NHS was run as a top-down system. We believe that it should be able to operate independently, making the decisions and changes that patients really need. Thats exactly why we introduced our reforms, to put doctors and nurses in charge and set up NHS England, to deliver the high quality health service patients expect.
Source Financial Times
